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“Shoah” at Twenty-Five

December 6, 2010

On the occasion of the re-release of Claude Lanzmann’s film “Shoah,” one of the summits of cinematic history, I wrote a Critic’s Notebook (available to subscribers) for the magazine this week about the philosophical implications of the filmmaker’s methods. The reissue is long overdue, as is the chance to write in the magazine about the film. The first time around, things went a little differently: The movie opened in New York on October 23, 1985, and Pauline Kael wrote a review of it (available to subscribers) for the issue of December 30, 1985. There, she wrote:

I ask the forbearance of readers for a dissenting view of a film that is widely regarded as a masterpiece. I found “Shoah” logy and exhausting right from the start, and when it had been going on for an hour or longer I was squirming restlessly, my attention slackening.

She then praises the testimony of Filip Müller, a Czech Jew who was part of a “special detail” that placed the corpses of murdered Jews into the crematorium, and of the Polish resistance leader Jan Karski (which comes near the end of the nine-hour film), but adds—with shocking lack of self-awareness of a metaphor that needs blocking—that “sitting in a theatre seat for a film as full of dead spaces as this one seems to me a form of self-punishment.” She writes, “Lanzmann has taken the Holocaust as his art work, and he aestheticizes everything for us.” No—the Holocaust was Hitler’s artwork, and it was a very bad one. Lanzmann’s work of art depicts the Holocaust, and the beauty of his depiction is derived not from the deeds of the Holocaust but from his quest itself—from the revelation of horror as horror, the presentation of Jews who survived the slaughter and of Jews who actively, even successfully, resisted their captors, of the moral assertion of the bearing of witness, and of his own effort to gain precise knowledge of the Holocaust, to come as close as possible to the horrific experience without risking the pornography of horror.

So when Kael charges that the movie “doesn’t set you to thinking” and adds, “When you come out, you’re likely to feel dazed, and confirmed in all your worst fears,” it’s clear that she simply doesn’t know what to think about it—and so, falls back on her own prejudices. She decrees that “implicitly, the film says that the past and the present are one—that this horror could happen again. See, the Polish peasants are still talking about how the Jews killed Christ and hoarded gold. They saw the smoke from the ovens—the death centers were in fields adjoining their farms—and they think the Jews deserved to burn.” Kael continues:

The way the evidence is presented in this movie, you can’t keep from passing judgment, and it’s almost always facile judgment against the Gentiles—even those who were powerless.

Actually, no—Lanzmann also talks with Poles who took significant risks to help Jews and to warn them of what awaited them in the camps. He finds, in Poland, a wide range of attitudes; some are, indeed, appalling, but the significance of this testimony isn’t to assail modern-day Poles (who were then living under Soviet dominion) but to account for the historical fact that, unlike, say, Denmark or Bulgaria, Poland didn’t offer much resistance to the German occupiers’ deportation, concentration, and execution of the local Jewish population. And to suggest as much is neither facile nor unfair—and it certainly has little relevance to the modern state of affairs there. Yet Kael goes on to say of Lanzmann,

The heart of his obsession appears to be to show you that the Gentiles will do it to the Jews again if they get a chance. “Shoah” is a long moan. It’s saying, “We’ve always been oppressed, and we’ll be oppressed again.”

Yet even Germans who were formerly concentration-camp officials admit to Lanzmann the outrageous immorality of their, and their government’s, treatment of Jews. “Shoah” distinguishes the Holocaust from anti-Semitism inasmuch as, if it shows anti-Semitism to be something of a commonplace, it shows the Holocaust to be a distinctive and exceptional event. Lanzmann (as Kael says) “accumulates data compulsively”: it’s both one of his methods for depicting the Holocaust and for demonstrating its specificity—as experience and as history. In showing the industrial precision and the mass-scale bureaucratic deception—both dependent on a totalitarian order—that went into Germany’s “final solution,” Lanzmann shows also that, if anti-Semitism was a necessary condition, it was far from a sufficient one. (In any case, it’s no less fair or true to demonstrate continuities between the Europe of the Second World War and the present day than to show the differences.)

Pauline Kael’s misunderstandings of “Shoah” are so grotesque as to seem willful. The wild subjectivity of her approach to the film—her writing about the feelings of her backside rather than the feelings of the people in the film or of its maker—suggests, overall, the basic problem with her criticism. She used movies as a pretext to give voice to her assumptions and her prejudices; she wrote about herself, without ever really writing about herself; she and her milieu seem to be what interested her most of all, and her autobiography, had she written one, would likely have been one of the literary marvels of her time. Lacking that, I wish there were a good biography—though I doubt that many of those who knew her best would talk. In the meantime, David Denby’s 2003 essay from the magazine, “My Life as a Paulette” (available to subscribers), is a good place to start.